A surprising jog to the right

“We’re not losing” isn’t much of a battle cry, but an article in the policy magazine City Journal with that modest message is attracting a lot of attention. The article, “We’re Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore” by senior editor Brian Anderson, argues that the left’s near monopoly in the entertainment and news media is “skidding to a startlingly swift halt.”

Much of Anderson’s evidence -- the rise of Fox News, talk radio, and conservative bloggers -- is familiar, but the article argues that a corner has been turned and the culture war is a far more even struggle now. This news may come as a shock to conservatives. It’s certainly a shock to Tim Noah, a liberal commentator at Slate. Noah read Anderson’s article, watched as the Reagan miniseries was pulled, then wrote glumly that the right has won the culture wars.

Hardly. The liberal worldview still dominates the news business, the arts, the entertainment world, publishing, the campuses, and all levels of schooling. It’s the media and educational status quo. But five years ago, CBS probably could have gotten away with a cheap-shot miniseries on the Reagans. Now it can’t. This is partly because of market forces, as conservative columnist Robert Bartley and liberal columnist Richard Reeves both pointed out. Reeves called the miniseries “commercially insane.” Large conservative audiences no longer accept many liberal products, so those products are adapted or abandoned. The other reason for the ditching of the Reagan miniseries is that the conservative media world is now good at gang tackling. From Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report (which framed the issue of the miniseries) to Fox, the bloggers, talk radio hosts, and the columnists, everybody piled on. New York Times columnist David Brooks touched on this point some time ago, writing that the new conservative media have “cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out.” For liberals, this is an ominous development.